Madam, – Your paper reports that Whyte’s is due today to auction an Office of Public Works (OPW) file relating to the visit to Ireland of Queen Victoria in 1900 (Michael Parsons, Front page, April 12th). I recall that earlier this year Dr Ciarán Ó Murchadha and Prof LM Cullen referred to the relatively recent destruction of OPW records relating to relief works during the Famine (Letters, January 10th and 12th).
It might be reasonable to ask how the file of a government office could have come into private possession. Of course, if some records were destroyed then it is possible that others were removed. The asking price of €400-600 for the OPW file seems reasonable, even in our current straitened circumstances, so it is to be hoped that the State will acquire it and place it with the rest of the surviving OPW records in the National Archives.
Yet that should not be the end of the matter, as inquiries into the fate of other missing or unaccounted for OPW records should ensue. Our treatment of archives since the destruction of the Four Courts in 1922 has been less than adequate. We need an up-to-date and comprehensive inventory of public records, but there is no general guide to the National Archives and the last published report of the director is dated 2006.
Finally, on the subject of missing records, what could have happened to the 1911 census returns for most of the families of Valentia Island, which are not to be found on the National Archives’s online access website? – Yours, etc,